Everything is Trolling Now

[ashlesha]

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/ever..._trolling_now/

If everyone is a troll, maybe no one is.
In the past few years, accusations of “trolling” have flown across the Internet fast and furious; recently, the targets have included a New York Times feature about the popularity of chopped salads, just about everything Vice does, and a cover of Rolling Stone featuring Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
But for a word that’s tossed around so frequently, its meaning seems to evaporate into air when grasped at. Trolling is bad. Trolling provokes a reaction, usually negative. Trolling is apparently quite easy to do. But, if only to better gird one’s own defenses against it — what is trolling?
“I think that it started with a pretty clear definition — which is somebody who goes into a place that shares a particular ideology and says something they don’t believe just to get a reaction,” said Sady Doyle, a feminist blogger and staff writer for In These Times.
“Originally, it was, like, racist Reddit kids going into r/blackgirls — that was old-school trolling, a very specific online behavior,” said Matt Buchanan, a tech blogger for the New Yorker, referring to the popular message board and clearinghouse for human pathologies in which racist, sexist or homophobic vitriol flowed freely. On Reddit, clearly defined groups sort themselves according to demographics, identity and ideology — a troll would attempt to disrupt these groups, and order as normal. Trolls, as classically defined, could insert themselves into any number of milieus; the classic New York Times Magazine piece documenting the state of the troll in 2008 recorded instances like self-defined trolls hacking the Epilepsy Foundation’s website in order to fill it with flashing lights, triggers for epileptics. As an action designed to harm and upset a specific group of people, it wasn’t exactly a newspaper piece about salad.

[ashlesha]

@hkkmr

[Aquagraph]

@hkkmr

Yes!
My first thought when reading the OP.

[mu4]

Trolling is basically something that happens far more frequently than before. When the internet first began the market penetration of the internet was maybe 1%, most of these individuals professionals and academics. Today it's a vast majority of the modernized world, and well you can see it's state.

Anonymized identities on the internet is a vehicle for trolling which is why a lot of things have moved into non-anonymized networks such as twitter, facebook, linked in. The amount of trolling on non-anonymized networks is many orders of magnitude less than anonymized.

This site is semi-anonymized as people do often use their real life here but generally names are hidden to other users. This has kept the trolling down somewhat but it's still very high and likely only to increase.

Most of the comment sections in major media publications have either been overhauled or are moving to non-anonymized credentials like facebook, regardless of this move the amount of toxicity on theses sites is growing and the comments sections are often dead and extremely bad state.

Forums as a whole have generally declined in popularity since the advent of non-anonymized networks. This site will remain anonymized for people that want it to be, since I see the internet as having a need for that.

[HandiAce]

"“I think that it started with a pretty clear definition — which is somebody who goes into a place that shares a particular ideology and says something they don’t believe just to get a reaction,”

This means I love trolling "open-minded" liberals.

[InvisibleJim]

This means I love trolling "open-minded" liberals.

"Open-minded" liberals like hkkmr are usually the first people to use 'Trolling' as an accusation to allow them to be closed minded when others disagree.

See legendary t16t troll, legerdemain, who is well known for being generally well behaved and pleasant who occassionally chooses to post with some degree of thought and rationality. That's totally trolling to the "open-minded" liberals because they are closed minded.

[mu4]

Political discussion is allowed, since I don't moderate for that.

[blackburry]

So… basically this article alleges that 'troll' is becoming a new mainline buzzword for whiners to decry shit they dislike (and thereby drown out potential for reasonable dialogue into a conflated morass of emotionally charged connotation).

Like that's ever going to work.



fucking lol

lol I was just going to comment on the part about the Epilepsy Foundation website... those sons of bitches... that's horrible

[Creepy-male]

Haha I think there is some validity to this beyond it being a catch all phrase for something someone dislikes.

I mean there is a spectrum... I could see someone disliking it if someone savagely gang raped their young daughter and left her in the desert to die and I could also see how someone could dislike something like a person cutting them off in traffic. Although being cut off is way less severe than the gang rape. So its a spectrum. To simply disregard the entire phenomenon under one blanket of "its for whiners" is ignoring that spectrum.

Besides what you are really objecting to is how people handle these disagreements. Whining is usually unproductively expressing dissatisfaction in a particular emotionally volatile way. A lot of people would rather prefer to take action than simply unproductively express things as whining. But this is also on a spectrum. If say someone is annoying me outdoors because they continually keep pressing the lock button on their car and its beeping over and over and over. I could "take action" by walking up to them seizing their keys and then smashing them beneath a boot heel. Although most people would consider this overly dramatic, brash, and destructive. I could argue I didn't want to talk to them and instead preferred to take action.

Let's say you talk to them, then when you try to make a request they ignore you and accuse you of whining. There is a difference though, whining is all about the emotional catharsis and isn't communicating with a clear course of action. It's merely getting it out of your system. But you try to explain this to them, and they will keep saying its whining, and they would partially be right because they are impervious to your attempts to speak rationally to them and instead the only purpose in your words is now effectively to merely get it out of your system since the other side isn't receiving any of it.

So therefore basic the accusation that "it's all just whining" isn't really that useful, it completely disregards the communicative aspect and it completely disregards the spectrum of severity. It implies everyone is just "over-exaggerating" everyone. Not to mention that it's basically just whining about whining.

I don't like it when people talk about things they don't like! Oh shut up, that's hows its always been, like you can control what people talk about or not or you have more of a right to classify people as whiners than they have the right to classify you as an asshole.

It's just infantile name calling.

The phenomenon of trolling is pretty interesting imo, I'd rather explore the issue than play the stoic squint eyed tough guy. That's just me though.

I think people are looking for cheap stimulation and playing the "shock jock" role a lot more due to the controlled state of society and people have lost touch with their ability to communicate or focus on higher-minded things. In fact most people would associate science for example to something like bill nye the science guy, nerds, science class, or something else that's very corny and systematized and related to school or the kind of "safe-zone" of suburban life and not being cool or dangerous. When in fact I can also see that there is a sort of exploration with it and curiosity and deep questions, but this is largely overshadowed. I think many things are like that, people are just being shock jocks to test their ability to break out of what feels like an imposing system of normality and conformity, and as a result the higher-minded aspects that would seek to elevate people beyond this mediocrity are suffering as well, but partly because they are tied to this normality and conformity and not given back to the people at a grassroots level.

Even music and art, is primarily fed and marketed to people like fattening up ducks for production of Foie gras. They just jam a feed tub down people's throats and they just eat it up and provides the people on top a gourmet lifestyle. As a result I think the state of cultural is largely focus on aggressive feeding tube style marketing being opposed on the bottom by shock jock trolling and it's resulting in global retardation of massive explosive proportions. Someone needs to step in and stop the cycle by jamming that feeding tube up the asses of the idiots marketing that crap and then grab their balls and decide to life their life on their own terms. Shock jocking is just as infantile because it still feeds the people at the top, they are still being talked about, they are still getting attention, they are still getting their marketing exposure.

[Absurd]

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/ever..._trolling_now/

Biased "study" is biased. The voluntarily commenter already is biased towards one group of people.

[Words]

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/ever..._trolling_now/

If everyone is a troll, maybe no one is.
In the past few years, accusations of “trolling” have flown across the Internet fast and furious; recently, the targets have included a New York Times feature about the popularity of chopped salads, just about everything Vice does, and a cover of Rolling Stone featuring Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
But for a word that’s tossed around so frequently, its meaning seems to evaporate into air when grasped at. Trolling is bad. Trolling provokes a reaction, usually negative. Trolling is apparently quite easy to do. But, if only to better gird one’s own defenses against it — what is trolling?
“I think that it started with a pretty clear definition — which is somebody who goes into a place that shares a particular ideology and says something they don’t believe just to get a reaction,” said Sady Doyle, a feminist blogger and staff writer for In These Times.
“Originally, it was, like, racist Reddit kids going into r/blackgirls — that was old-school trolling, a very specific online behavior,” said Matt Buchanan, a tech blogger for the New Yorker, referring to the popular message board and clearinghouse for human pathologies in which racist, sexist or homophobic vitriol flowed freely. On Reddit, clearly defined groups sort themselves according to demographics, identity and ideology — a troll would attempt to disrupt these groups, and order as normal. Trolls, as classically defined, could insert themselves into any number of milieus; the classic New York Times Magazine piece documenting the state of the troll in 2008 recorded instances like self-defined trolls hacking the Epilepsy Foundation’s website in order to fill it with flashing lights, triggers for epileptics. As an action designed to harm and upset a specific group of people, it wasn’t exactly a newspaper piece about salad.

Crazey rat

[Words]

Well anyway the internet has bred a bunch of people with no social skills with no idea how to deal with the consequences of their actions, it's no wonder people like @Absurd live in squaller and many of the rest would if they weren't having parents supporting them on the meantime.

Keep up the good fight there lungs.

[ashlesha]

Well anyway the internet has bred a bunch of people with no social skills with no idea how to deal with the consequences of their actions, it's no wonder people like @Absurd live in squaller and many of the rest would if they weren't having parents supporting them on the meantime.

Keep up the good fight there lungs.

stop trolling

[InvisibleJim]

squaller.

[InvisibleJim]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/squalor

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Squaller

Grammar jokes are best jokes.

[Words]

stop trolling

These people you support don't work for much more than the minimum wage if that.

IJ just doesn't have any friends stuck in Mexico.

[InvisibleJim]

'Troll' now seems to be used as a synonym for refering to some who 'pulls on your heart strings in a non-positive way'. Since unless you are unbalanced most people at some point will tug on your emotions in a negative way. So by definition I postulate that people are mostly trolls.

[ashlesha]

'Troll' now seems to be used as a synonym for refering to some who 'pulls on your heart strings in a non-positive way'. Since unless you are unbalanced most people at some point will tug on your emotions in a negative way. So by definition I postulate that people are mostly trolls.

who are you talking to?

[Words]

'Troll' now seems to be used as a synonym for refering to some who 'pulls on your heart strings in a non-positive way'. Since unless you are unbalanced most people at some point will tug on your emotions in a negative way. So by definition I postulate that people are mostly trolls.

Troll

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people,

Wiki

In real life if you go about tugging 'on your emotions in a negative way' towards all you will find yourself isolated and quite likely jobless.

You are projecting yourself onto others, you *are* a troll.

[InvisibleJim]

who are you talking to?

Imma answering the OP C:

Troll

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people.

[ashlesha]

ohhh i misread/misinterpreted. gotcha

[InvisibleJim]

ohhh i misread/misinterpreted. gotcha

Happy to help lung's.

In conclusion, I'm going to avoid using the word 'Troll' as much in future. Surely it would be better just to say 'I like this person' or 'I don't like that person', because...

This will open up a whole new layer of granularity in interpersonal relationships.

[Words]

Imma answering the OP C:

Everyone knows you are trolling.

Not clever enough to rewrite the exact same definition of troll as if it's different from the actual definition and what you are doing.

And not everyone is a troll.

Next you might try to say like OJ simpson, something like perhaps, everyone is a murderer.

Of course all of this would not have to be explained if you behaved like a non trolling person, but your actions add weight to what seemed like ridiculous content in the OP, even although that content was intended to troll hkkmr.

[bolong]

"Originally, it was, like, racist Reddit kids going into r/blackgirls — that was old-school trolling, a very specific online behavior,” said Matt Buchanan, a tech blogger for the New Yorker

Sorry but this was hilarious.

[xerx]

If you suspect someone of being a troll either ignore them or troll them back.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

I believe trollers are using this information to keep trolling. But it's the internet. As long as you don't bother me in real life too much, troll me all you want.

Trollers are often sensitive, cuddly people.

Actually IRL I'm trolled too. Customers try to gaslight me at work saying they ordered vanilla ice cream when really they ordered chocolate... trying to confuse your mind. Redneck str8 men like to feed on my spirit cuz it gives their boring little truck driving lives some sense of purpose ya know.

But you just shake it off and enjoy the smell of your own spirit ya know.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

If you suspect someone of being a troll either ignore them or troll them back.

Nah you never ignore a bully. They know that you're trying to toughen up and 'not let it bother you' so they just keep trying harder and harder until you cry. You don't troll them back either... you kick their ass physically.

But that's the point. You can't 'kick somebody's ass over the internet' so that's why there's so many trolls.

In before Absurd says Gay!